EACH one of us has our own recollections of where we were when we heard the news and how we reacted to it.

On Dec 27, 2007, I was at Dawn, sitting in my office, going about the editor’s daily business for that part of the day when TV channels started breaking the news of a shooting-bombing attack on Benazir Bhutto in Rawalpindi.

But, as I tried to call with little success members of our team in the capital, some of these channels started updating their bulletins quoting Rehman Malik that BB was fine. Along with Farhatullah Babar and Babar Awan, he was travelling in a vehicle supposedly not far from hers. Somehow even this didn’t replace the alarm with relief. Anxiety persisted. As a student and then journalist who’d witnessed the travails and political career of the PPP leader for nearly 30 years and for whom I felt considerable personal warmth, I needed to know for sure.

Images spanning decades were flashing before my eyes. The thin young woman whose face I saw at her car window as she exited 70 Clifton and being driven at high speed to the airport, into exile in the early 1980s. The beaming leader who returned to a tumultuous welcome in 1986.

The tireless campaigner, whose campaign trail we joined in 1988. Sitting in her cabin in the train carriage, we realised she’d lost her voice and thought she’d disappoint the thousands thronging to every station on the journey. She proved us wrong and found enough in her vocal chords to bring cheers from her supporters. Her connection with them was almost instant and electric.

The most lasting image of Benazir Bhutto in my mind was when she entered the hall for her oath-taking as prime minister in 1988. She exchanged glances with her mother Begum Nusrat Bhutto. It seemed they’d relived and put behind the agony of a decade in that moment of triumph.

Then I thought of the times we met in London. Once she asked me my opinion about the interview she’d just given. I responded with: “I am a BBC journalist. It isn’t my place to say.” She smilingly mocked me by saying: “So you decide when you are a friend and when a BBC journalist.”

But most of all I recalled, with fondness, meeting her on dozens of occasions after having lashed out at her decisions in print. Each time she greeted me with warmth. She was a fighter. She’d forcefully argue she was right and I was wrong but never harboured a grudge. Many journalists would share the view.

I may have been a few seconds into my thoughts, when my office door was flung open. I looked up and saw Afshan Subohi, my colleague at Dawn and classmate and comrade from university. Her eyes were brimming with tears. She almost screamed at me: Abbas, they have killed her.

Not wanting to believe her, I drew her attention to the media updates quoting Rehman Malik. She shook her head and informed me she’d been told by a source at the hospital where BB had been taken that she was dead, though a frantic resuscitation attempt had been made.

Who would not have sobbed that evening at the tragedy? We all did. But soon professional considerations started to beckon. So, we moved to planning and preparing the next day’s Dawn. A front page editorial had to be written, obituaries commissioned, a million small things done.

Jamil Akhtar Sahib, the accomplished news editor, and leader of the paper’s unsung heroes, the copy editors and layout team, who work into the small hours every day and without whose effort there wouldn’t be a paper, had sterling input into the next day’s banner headline.

As I write these lines, multitudes are gathered at Garhi Khuda Bux, in a tribute to their revered assassinated leader on the sixth anniversary of the ghastly crime that snatched her from them, where she lies buried alongside her father and brothers.

Writing from Garhi Khuda Bux in this paper yesterday, the perceptive Qasim Moini describes the devotion of the PPP ‘jiyala’ which remains “Even if the broken streets and ramshackle homes right outside the Bhutto mausoleum are a world away from the gleaming structure inside the high walls of the complex.”

There is considerable speculation about when young Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari will enter parliament. To me there are matters more significant. Like his mother, Bilawal is avowedly wedded to a progressive, anti-obscurantist agenda.

But my problem with the PPP for years has been the slip between cup and lip. Its agenda notwithstanding, corruption (and it isn’t all mere allegations) at the highest tiers of the party, lack of homework when in opposition, leading to slipshod governance, are among the issues clouding its future.

The PPP has only Sindh for now. But if abject poverty isn’t addressed, if provision of education and healthcare not ensured on an urgent, even emergency basis, the PPP might end up giving a Sir Charles Napier’s ‘Peccavi’ (I have sinned) a literal meaning.

“We are prepared to risk our lives, we are prepared to risk our liberty but we are not prepared to surrender our great nation to the militants,” said Benazir Bhutto, a day after she survived twin suicide bombings in Karachi on Oct 18, 2007.

However, the tide of militancy will not be turned by just risking lives anymore. Clear, enlightened polices and blemish-free governance may perhaps. Can the new generation PPP leadership deliver where its predecessors failed?

The PPP’s rebirth in Punjab and KP may/may not happen. For now let’s see if PPP can retain Sindh.

The writer is a former editor of Dawn.

abbas.nasir@hotmail.com